Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 26 -- If Kazakhs
demand that their national language takes precedence over all others in all
situations in that Central Asian country, Kazakhstan President Nursultan
Nazarbayev warned in a television interview this week, they risk seeing their
country suffer as Ukraine now is.
If Kazakhstan were to “ban all
languages except Kazakh,” he said, “what would await us then? The fate of
Ukraine.” And that in turn, the Kazakhstan leader continued, could cost the
country “bloodshed” or even its independence.
What is needed instead, he continued, is “patience” (news.nur.kz/328128.html).
“The number of Kazakhs is growing
and so too is the influence of our language,” Nazarbayev said. “No one is
blocking this.” Moreover, “there are many representatives of other ethnoses” in
Kazakhstan “who speak Kazakh,” and “we must ourselves value our language.”
One way not to do that, he
continued, is to “sow panic” about the supposed inability of the Kazakh
language to make progress. “If you consider yourself unhappy, you will be,” and
if people “constantly affirm that they do not have [a language], then they won’t
have one.” But that is not the case in Kazakhstan.
Every year, Nazarbayev said, 100,000
children finish school, of which 80,000 study in Kazakh.” More than that, “in every school, Russia or
otherwise, the study of the Kazakh language is obligatory. Any student of the
sixth or seventh class, for example, now speaks Kazakh, Russian and even
English.”
Kazakhs concerned about their
language, he continued, ignore this; and because they think they must “move
away from Russian,” they are taking words “from Turkish, Arabic or Persian”
when the words they had been using are entirely adequate. “We must enrich our language with
international terms. There is nothing bad about that.”
According to Nazarbayev, the Kazakh language
today is not threatened by “any danger.” Instead, it is “growing and becoming
richer and a great future awaits it.” That is especially obvious if one
considers its development in a work where ten percent of the 6,000 languages in
the world are dying each year.
Seventy percent of the world’s
population now uses English, he continued, “because this is the language of
science, education, medicine, culture and the media. Of course, one can live
without a knowledge of English,” but you won’t live as well. If Kazakhs are to
develop, the younger generation must learn English as well as Kazakh and
Russian.
Nazarbayev added that he “considers
trilingualism the correct choice,” noting that Kazakh is “competitive” with the
other two. “If we will know these three languages, then we will gain greater
opportunities. This is something we must understand.”
The Kazakhstan
president’s remarks are noteworthy for three reasons. First, they highlight the
ways in which Russian actions in Ukraine are having an impact on the other
countries in the post-Soviet space, simultaneously leading to fears that Moscow
will intervene and intensifying nationalism among the titular groups.
Second, they
point to the reason why Nazarbayev is confident that Kazakh is gaining and will
continue to gain in his country, a trend that whether he acknowledges it or not
almost certainly will trigger more concerns in Moscow about its ability to hold
that country in what Putin calls the orbit of “the Russian world.”
And third,
Nazarbayev’s remarks underscore the growing importance of English in these
countries, yet another indication of the ways in which they are moving away
from the bilingual world of Soviet times to a trilingual one, a development
that makes perfect sense given the international environment but also one that
will disturb Russian nationalists in Moscow.
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